Vociferous support for a new northern state

Gina Rinehart
,
Bob Katter
and former Queensland Labor treasurer
Andrew Fraser
are three people unlikely to agree on much.

But all three have called for a serious push for a new state in northern Australia.

Proposals to create a new state are hardly new but they are a step away from the prevailing view that any reform to Australia’s federal system should centre on reducing states’ role, if not abandoning them altogether.

Support for a reduction has come from all sides in the past 12 months including former prime ministers Bob Hawke and John Howard, Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce and Mr Fraser’s former boss Peter Beattie.

Most recent polling on the issue conducted in October last year by Griffith University shows two-thirds of Australians are unhappy with the country’s system of government and wanted reform.

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The Australian Constitutional Values Survey also showed 30 per cent of Australians thought abolishing states would be the way forward.

Geoscientists have tweaked Australia’s borders from time to time but major changes have been few and a long time ago. In 1915, the Australian Capital Territory acquired a port from NSW on its south coast at Jervis Bay, and in 1931, Central Australia and North Australia combined to become the Northern Territory.

Andrew Fraser has called for change to the federation that would reflect demographic changes over the past 100 years.

Fraser, who lost his seat in last year’s electoral wipeout of Labor in Queensland, says a “reinvigorated" federation should consider making north Queensland its own state, look at the NSW/Victoria border, and the northern border of NSW and Queensland.

The former state treasurer, who grew up in the north Queensland town of Proserpine, says state governments were vital and in the past have done a good job of delivering services such as healthcare.

Writing in The Australian Financial Review’s opinion pages, Fraser was sharply critical of those calling for a reduction in states’ role.

But professor AJ Brown, of Griffith University’s school of government, who conducted the survey last year, said it may be an issue of semantics and that everyone agreed on the need for change.

“Our survey shows 40 per cent of Australians want regional governments. It may be that in their heads the concept of regional governments is the same as those who are pushing for new states," he says.

“Whether you call it a state, a region, a province, it doesn’t matter. What matters is its size and its powers and that is what we should be discussing because it is clear people want the system to be restructured."

Federal MP Bob Katter says he will push the idea of establishing a region in northern Australia in this year’s federal election.

“Now speaking as Australian first and not as a far north Queenslander, I think the region should be ‘North Australia’, encompassing the top of Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia," he says.

“The fact is in Australia’s history, these are the places that have suffered from the tyranny of the majority, that most of the population of the country is in the south-east."

The member for Kennedy, whose electorate stretches from the Pacific Ocean to Northern Territory border and takes in Mount Isa, Clonclurry and Charters Towers, says Katter’s Australia Party is developing policies in Queensland ahead of the election that will focus on the area.

“We will look at devoting a quarter of all government spending in Queensland to the north. It won’t be perfect or efficient, but I tell you it will be effective," he says.

The northern third of the country is underdeveloped because is lacks political muscle, Katter says. There are hundreds of major dams in the southern part of the country, but just three in the top third which is holding back agriculture and mining in the region, he says.

“What this region needs is water and base load power. We have mineral deposits up here like gold that we can’t process because we don’t have the power, or the water," he says.

“Australia has five of the 24 known phosphate reserves in the world and we are only working one of them. We can’t work on others because we don’t have the power, the water, or the canal to get it to port or the port to get it on the ship."

The colourful MP announced this week that Katter’s Australian Party will field a candidate in all 150 House of Representatives and on the Senate ticket for most states.

Katter says Northern Territory and Western Australia could be producing biofuels for the Asian boom, but poor decision making by state governments held the region back.

“We could build these regions and create 500,000 jobs by selling this stuff to the Chinese, but instead we go and sell half the Ord to the Chinese so they can do it themselves. It doesn’t make any sense."

Last year, Chinese company Shanghai ZhongFu bought 15,000 hectares of Ord River agricultural land in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, and plans to build a $250 million sugar mill near Kununurra to produce ethanol. Katter says local companies would help keep the wealth in the region.

“The area needs self-management. Where else in the world is a region ruled by a seat of government 2000 kilometres away. Even in Russia, they have more effective local representation than Brisbane is for north Queensland."

There have been pushes for new states before.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, the NSW region of New England, which encompasses Tamworth and Armidale and is currently held by independent MP Tony Windsor, had a movement pushing for statehood, but a failed referendum in 1967 ended the push.

At times, “Capricornia" has been floated for far north Queensland, and “Northern Australia" has to take in the Northern Territory and areas of northern and inland Queensland.

In December, the country’s richest person,
Gina Rinehart
, published a book celebrating the idea put forward by her father Lang, to establish a special economic region in northern Australia. Northern Australia and Then Some, laid out her ideas to develop the region with reduced taxes, no stamp duty, less red tape and guest worker visas.

But how would the country fare with more states?

Business leaders including Qantas Airways chief executive officer Alan Joyce say the country’s infrastructure needs are hampered by the need to deal with three levels of government.

And the most recent Commonwealth of Australian Governments meeting in early December showed even the most innocuous of reforms can prove difficult when a rogue state refuses to co-operate.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard together with state and territory leaders looked on bemusedly at Queensland Premier
Campbell Newman
when he refused to back changes to royal succession laws, which would remove gender-based discrimination for royal succession and allow royals to marry Catholics. Newman said Queensland should make its own legislative changes, and not refer the powers to federal government, despite his fellow Liberal premiers backing the move.

Any benefits that could flow from a new state would have to be balanced against the likely increased frustration of the COAG process.